Wait, doesn't GPL also specifically allows reselling ?

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html

(And GNU even encourages it.)

See also about selling exceptions to GPL, like Qt does :

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling-exceptions.html

It allows reselling, yes, but since anyone who buys it could give it away to everyone else for free, it doesn't really happen much.

Because I want to give my software away to individuals and small companies, but if someone gets big enough that they can afford to pay, I want them to pay me then. I don't want to discourage them from using my thing when they're small.

That makes sense. What I mean is that you can do that. Set up a license so rich people can’t use it.

What I meant is that releasing software under a license that doesn’t reflect what I want and the complaining will just lead to frustration.

This seems like a simple problem to solve, just release under whatever license I want. This faker.js project is released under MIT. The author can continue development under some non-OSS license and I think that will make him happier because rich people would stop using it. But I don’t think it will make him the income he wants.

I think the problem is that non-OSS licenses will result in people just not using the project, not that rich people will start shelling out.

As a small business, I would avoid these licenses as well because having multiple licenses kick in at different levels will be confusing and expensive. I’d rather use OSS or just buy commercial products.

Oh, agreed. I'm more lamenting the fact that there's no good license for this (that I'm aware of, anyway).

> As a small business, I would avoid these licenses as well because having multiple licenses kick in at different levels will be confusing and expensive. I’d rather use OSS or just buy commercial products.

You could just license it from the start and not have to worry about the license kicking in, though.

That's exactly what the maintainer of faker.js is doing. He decided to stop giving away free lunches.

Not really. The repo is still MIT. He said he won’t make further changes, but hasn’t set up his project with a different license.

It seems like his current take is just seeking patronage to keep working on an MIT project.

I think this happens quite a bit, but not normally this way. There are lots of companies who employ people with the sole purpose of writing for MIT/Apache/BSD projects. So I guess that’s a form of patronage.

I hope this guy gets what he likes. I’ve never heard of this project, but it has at least 26k people who liked it enough to star it on GitHub. Not sure how that will ever equate to 100k+/year.